The Warner sun. (Warner, Brown Co., Dakota [S.D.]) 1885-1???, 1887-02-04
NOVELlSTS.
A Bookseller Thinks He Would Rath-
er Be a Day Laborer Than a
Story Writer.

II believe | would rather work on
the aoueduct than write books for a
living, looking at it merely as matter
of manual labor said a Broadway
bookseller whose experience runs back
a quarter of a century. Did you ever
think of what the labors of writing
merely moving the pen over the paper
to say nothing Of the mental strain
must be in writing an ordinary book.
Take a novel Ike one of Mr.. HOwelPs,
for instance. 1t contains say $50 pages,
with an average of 400 words to the
page. or 140, 900 words. How many
hours of composition do you suppose
that means? Well. 1,400 words an
hour is considered a pretty good gat
ever if you know exactly what you
want to say and can clip along without
stopping to study construction. That
would mean, at least, under the most
favorable circumstances imaginable,
one hundred hours of writing. Now,
few authors can compose steadily more
than two hours a day. Surprising,
therefore, that the author knows ex-
actly what he wants to write every day
and can pillow on without interruption,
it would take fifty days to grind out a
book like one of Mr.. Howells'. But
many authors have assured me that on
an average they write each book over
three times before they are satisfied to
leave it. When you consider, besides
this, that the labor of writing is, OF
course, the merest trife compared with
the other labors of authorship you can
see that there is no picnic about it
When YOU think of all these things
the amount of work done by some OF
our leading novelists SCENES prodigious.
There is Miss Braddon, for instance.
Her t~ireless pen has already raced
through fifty complete works of fiction,
and there is no probability-hope, some
people might say-that her supply will
run short for twenty years to come.
P ohably there are 5000. 900 printed
words in those books. and to write them
her hand must have travelled over
so, 900 or $4,000 sheets of paper, even
on the s~upposition that she never tore
up or rewrote a sheet. Sixty thousand
sheets of manuscript paper would make
a pile a. high as this room. Supposing
that Miss Braddon labors under the
same limitations as other writer's, she
has probably written over three or four
such piles in. the past fifteen or twenty
years. To do that is no joke, l can tell
you. Yet there are others who have
done nearly as much. The works OF
The Duchess are numbered in the for
ties. The author of Dora Thorn" has
written thirty-nine. Mr.. Black has
written twenty-five novels. Besant and
Rice turned out twenty-three, and Viii.
kie Collins has published thirty-two.
Dickens works, including his sketches
collected into volumes and the story
that he wrote with Wilkie Collins, make
thirty five books. Nobody knows how
many Miss Holmes has turned out, but
some persons think there are a hundred
of them at least. Then look at the way
OIL yer Optic, Mrs. Southworth, and
| others have reeled out story after story,
year in and year out. The mar who
makes any money with his pen is no
sluggard, you can be sure.
Hsrd as these writer's work, however,
the serial story-writers for the weekly
papers do much better Tor worse) than
any of them. The serials they put
forth average about 5000 words in
length. One writer of this kind of trash
made SO, 900 from its production last
year. He received only $3.50 for each
serial. Consequently he must have
written in a single year twenty serials,
or 1,200. 900 words-nearly ten times
the quantity of matter produced in a
| year by the most prolific novelist. The
late Ned Buntline is said to have made
$500. 600 by writing this class Of litera-
ture. To do SO he must have ground
out during his lifetime not less than
10, 900, 900 words of copy, which means
an almost incalculable amount of labor
that. devoted to almost any other occu.
patton, would have made him a million.
aire. "-New York Mail and Express.
---